Publish Every Week

Even though I am in the software business, I like to read widely and outside my field. Sometimes, the non-software and non-business related stuff give me fresh ideas. Other times, they outright inspire me in ways I did not expect. For example, a particular thread by Nick Maggiulli inspired me to pursue publishing a page every week.

1 Tweetstorm on the power of New Year's Resolutions, the wonders of consistency, and discovering yourself.

Two years ago (NYE 2016), I decided I would start an anonymous investment blog. I registered the domain (https://t.co/PNGZNnoof8) and opened this Twitter account.

What I am going to do is to write out the three things I learn from his thread and that I’ll be experimenting with in the next few months.

Lesson 1: Just Publish Every Week

2 When I started I had something like 10 Twitter followers, all who were friends. I decided I would post once a week. Rain or shine. This was one of the most important decisions I ever made for the blog:

Nick is currently at post number 104. Which means he has published a post for 104 consecutive weeks. That’s some consistency. Another writer I admire is Tren Griffin from Microsoft. He has now written at least 1 post per week for over 200 consecutive weeks on his blog 25iq. This is something I will be focusing on in this blog starting with the first week of 2019.

Lesson 2: Your Friends and Family won’t care. That’s fine.

4 I know I wasn’t naive enough to expect them to enjoy finance and read my blog weekly, but was a few minutes to check it out and maybe comment on site design an outrageous ask?

I have always cared a bit too much about how other people think. The approach I will take is to accept that most of the people in my life currently won’t care what I write because that’s not what they are interested in.

Tiago Forte, another person I follow but works outside my field, has a similar point. Which is why he writes about getting new readers into your blog by simply asking new people you meet to add to your email list.

12) And my absolute best, foundational tip: create a newsletter list using @tinyletter, put the signup link in all your bios, and anytime someone thanks you or expresses appreciation, ask them if you can add them to your email list (and then do it, manually)

Bonus Lesson : Occasional Hits and Long Stretches of Slow Growth in between

13 This started the hardest phase of this project. Between July 2017 and November 2017 was arguably the darkest point of my life. Blog traffic was down from my highs in April, I felt like I was running out of ideas, and my personal life was in shambles.

I cannot recommend enough to read the whole thread. In it, you get an impression that Nick probably had long stretches of slow or non growth in between posts that struck gold. I’m going to end this post with this bonus lesson. All the lessons:

Publish every week

It’s fine when family and friends don’t read

Reach out to your heroes

They work as a stack. Lesson 3 doesn’t work if I don’t appreciate Lesson 2, and get past how most people won’t read my blog. Both lessons don’t matter if I don’t even publish every week in the first place.

This concludes my first published page for 2019. I have written other stuff before this. Regardless, for purely emotional reasons, I will classify this as my post #1. As in the first post since I devote myself to publishing every week.